A Tale of Two Days

It’s been an odd tale of days: Sunday heavy and warm and humid with the prescience of Wilma, bearing down nastily in a roaring migraine and upset stomach, the air outside witchily calm for the nearness of the storm, faint flutings of breeze, a far restlessness, no threat, not yet ... come Monday morning Wilma bears down on Miami with 120 mph winds, in a Category 3 snit ... Two hundred miles to the north it rained and blew but not infernally: just an overgenerous soak with suburban-wild tresses of wind. Trying to decide whether to drive the 25-mile commute into Orlando to work -- there is ever oh too much to do these days -- there are reports of tornadoes touching down to the south and east, near St. Cloud and Cocoa Village. Flooding in nearby Mascotte, a semi jacknifed on westbound I-4 ... But I head in anyway, a bit before 6 a.m., wipers furiously trying to clear a visual in the general black wretchedness of rain and winds buffeting my car about, traffic on the Orange Blossom Trial light (schools are closed, many businesses too), plodding along at 40 mph. Passing through Zellwood two huge bluesilver bursts into the sky to my left, not lightning, must be transformers giving up their ghost. Its miserable but passable. I get into work, soaked, nervous, but the power’s working fine and I settle soon into the rigors of the next working week, the day outside my window staying black til after 8 a.m., windows shimmying from gusts, traffic slowly shusshing down flooded Virginia Drive. On the tvs around the workplace Wilma stomps over South Florida, big storm surge in the Keys, 100 mph hr winds clocked at the National Hurricane Center in Miami, Brevard County getting mauled by the winds.

But Wilma’s visit to Florida is a fast one; odd that after spending 30 hours dumping some five feet of rain over the Yucatan Peninsula, that we here in Florida waited and waited and waited for her approach, that she should skeddadle over us in half a day. By noon the winds were cold as well as wet, 55 degrees on my car’s dash thermometer as I drove to the 7-11 for a sandwich and some gas, the strongest front of the year so far pressing down and squeezing Wilma fast to the east -- that huge storm, having crawled over Mexico at some 2 mph, roared like a raging maenad over us at 40 mph.
By 2 p.m. the sun was out, sharpening edges of what clouds still circled overhead; by the time I left for the gym it was clear and fine and breezy. You would never have known it was so ugly just a few hours earlier. The drier air of the front quickly evaporated most of the water on the streets, so driving home in the last of light it was as if it had never stormed here at all.

Not the story in South Florida, where 2 million people are without power and the soak is still everywhere ... After getting hit by three hurricanes last year, and then this year missing the welter of helterskelter storms which have cost maybe 50 billion dollars in insured losses and exhausted the alphabet of suspects -- odd times indeed.

So when I got home at dusk our yard was autumnally fine, yard well watered, garden in latter bloom, big plastic moon with its abroom witch lighted in the upstairs closet window where the arches of the roof meet, welcoming me and the season and that finally cooling night. Home sweet home. Inside my wife was finishing up a turkey dinner and Violet was in the one opened window, savoring the cool, her eyes soft slits, ears perked to the other world. Blue and Red, those rogue cats we feed on the back porch, had killed a big white dove in their cool-weather funk -- assholes, doing what comes naturally -- we despise their cruelty and pour our love over ‘em incessantly. (Setting boxes with towels in them on the chairs on the back porch so they have someplace warm to settle come the night.)

Tales of a season which creeps toward All Hallows ...